Your Key to Success in Equine Clicker Training (clickertraining.ca)

Posts tagged ‘free’

If you know me, you know I am a huge fan of celebrating successes. I know this year my blog will hit the 100.000 views! Something I didn’t foresee when I started. Time to celebrate! With you! This is how: I will give away a 30 minute coaching session ($35 value) or a ticket to participate in my HippoLogic Clicker Challenge ($47 value).

Why I started blogging

I started this blog as an online (accountability) training journal to tell my friends and family (and maybe a few strangers) about Kyra’s training.

She was 11 months old en just caught out of the wild (a nature reserve in The Netherlands). She didn’t want to deal with people, she was super scared for everything and only ate hay. No carrots, apple, sugar cubes of horse treats. Quite a challenge to start with positive reinforcement.

After 3 weeks of daily training (twice a day in the first week) I could approach (a BIG deal!), halter her, touch her all over, lead her over the premises (only if other horses stayed in eye sight, but it was a start), lift her feet and even disinfect the wound on her leg with a spray can. Every month I put a summary on my blog to list our achievements.

Kyra was my first horse that I made clear goals for (taming her was my #1 goal). It is because I wrote down my goals, discussed them with my best friend, my accountability partner. I also kept track of how I trained behaviours and kept a logbook so I could reproduce my results. This all lead to developing HippoLogic’s Key Lessons, Your Keys to Success in Positive Reinforcement training program. I wanted to develop an easy to follow step-by-step program for horse lovers who want to implement clicker training.

Becoming a blogger was an important step in this whole process. I want to celebrate this with you: my readers and loyal followers of my blog!

2012 the year of many changes

In 2012 we (my husband, our 1 year old son, our 2 cats and Kyra) emigrated to Canada. I changed from working mom to stay-at-home mom without a social network in my personal life or in my horse world. I left all my friends, family and horse riding clients behind and I really missed them.

I struggled, I had happy times, felt lonely, was home sick, was happy again. I felt it all! Then, in 2014, I decided to restart my blog, so I had something to do besides being a mom. I missed teaching riding lessons and helping equestrians so much!

In October 2014 I wrote my first blog in English. I posted 9 articles that year. Yes, that is how I started. Now I publish about 100 each year.

Time to Celebrate!

In order to celebrate my upcoming 100.000st view I decided to give away a 30 minute coaching session ($35 value) or a ticket to participate in my HippoLogic Clicker Challenge ($47 value).

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I improve the human-horse relationships by reconnecting you with your inner wisdom and teach you the principles of learning and motivation, so you become confident and knowledgeable to train your horse in an effective and FUN way. Win-win for horse and human.

All my programs are focused on building your confidence and provide you with a detailed step-by-step formula to train horses with 100% positive reinforcement.

One of the most underestimated challenges of positive reinforcement training can be… people in your environment.

It is a journey
The journey to switch from negative reinforcement (most traditional and natural horsemanship methods) to positive reinforcement training (clicker training, on target training) is instructive and beautiful.

It is not always a straight, fast or smooth road. It is often a winding, bumpy road with lots of ups and downs, but the views are astonishing. You will see many positive changes in your horse and your relationship.

On your journey you will learn how to think outside of the box, it will teach you to become more creative. It will teach you how to think in solutions instead of problems and it will alter the relationship with your horse in an extraordinarily beautiful way.

Slowly you start using more and more rewards to reinforce your horse to do things for you. Then you might slowly stop using the tools that your horse experiences as aversive, like a whip, rope halter, training stick or spurs. So far so good, until… you encounter a hiccup.

Believe me when I tell you: this day will happen. Your horse doesn’t do what you ask him to do. You can’t figure out why or you can’t figure out a way to ask him differently so he will understand. You don’t have enough tools yet, so you don’t have an answer right away. That’s OK. It is OK to not know everything right away. What to do?

Back to default
It is perfectly normal to fall back to your old tools or habits of using pressure, force or even to inflict pain. Don’t blame yourself for it. Becoming aware is the first step in changing! Hooray!

If you are prepared for this day, and it will happen, you can just simply say to yourself. “Hey, you know what? I don’t know what to do. Let’s figure it out first. Let’s find help and try again another time.” Really, it is OK not to know what to do! And it is also OK to stop your training until you do know how to solve your training problem in a way that is acceptable for you and your horse”.

Remember what is most important
Choosing to make your horse your priority can be extremely hard to do. Especially when other people are watching you work. Imagine that the farrier has come to trim your horses’ feet. Your horse is afraid of the farrier or there is something else that causes your horse not to cooperate the way he normally does. It can be hard to listen to your horse and figure out the ‘why’. Your horse probably has a very good reason.

In most cases it is OK to say: “Sorry, my horse is not prepared enough yet. Let’s do this another time.” Do what you need to do in order to protect your relationship and the trust you have build with positive reinforcement. In Dutch we have a saying:
Trust arrives walking and departs riding. Which means that trust is hard to build and easy to loose.

Do you really want to risk your relationship with your horse so the farrier can do his/her job right now? It can be dangerous for everyone if the farrier is more a traditional person. Or would you rather choose to make sure the farrier and your horse are safe next time?

Would you like to know how to deal with peer pressure at your barn? It is all covered in the Ultimate Horse Training Formula, HippoLogic’s online complete home study course.

Safe the date: Thursday March 7, 2019 and join us!

Ultimate Horse Training Formula, Your Key to Succes

Would you like to use clicker training in your every day training, use it all situations and for all horses successfully?

If you are ready to get the results in clicker training you really, really want this is the course for you.

Do you want to have a more clarity and confidence in training your own horse?

Do you want to become skilled and experienced in training your horse with positive reinforcement all by yourself?

Would you like to have personal support while practising your new skills?

Free discovery call with Sandra

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win!

Sign up for HippoLogic’s newsletter (it’s free and it comes with a gift) or visit HippoLogic’s website and join my online course Ultimate Horse Training Formula in which you learn the Key Lessons, Your Key to Success in Clicker Training.